Chrétien de Troyes

Crestïens de Troies was a late 12th-century French poet who played a key part in creating the romance form and in popularizing the Arthurian legend in Europe. His name is conventionally given in the modernized form Chrétien de Troyes.

English quotations are taken from the translations by D. D. R. Owen: Chrétien de Troyes Arthurian Romances (London, 1987) ISBN 0460116983.

Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, together with that highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, and that it may be made so welcome here that the honour which has taken refuge with us may never depart from France: God had awarded it as another's share, but of Greeks and Romans no more is heard, their fame is passed, and their glowing ash is dead.

Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure...He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.